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From : EdwardTheHauntedBoy
Added: Apr 2, 2008
About Korean: Korean (한국어/조선말) is the official language of both North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China. There are about 80 million Korean speakers, with large groups in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, the United States, post-Soviet states, and more recently the Philippines. The genealogical classification of the Korean language is debated. Some linguists place it in the Altaic language family, while others consider it to be a language isolate. It is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax. Like the Japanese and Vietnamese languages, Korean language was influenced by the Chinese language in the form of Sino-Korean words. Native Korean words account for about 35% of the Korean vocabulary, while about 60% of the Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words. The remaining 5% comes from loan words from other languages, 90% of which are from English. The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in North and South Korea. In North Korea and Yanbian in China, the language is most often called Chosŏnmal (조선말; with hanja: 朝鮮말), or more formally, Chosŏnŏ (조선어; 朝鮮語). In the Republic of Korea, the language is most often called Hangungmal (한국말; 韓國말), or more formally, Hangugeo (한국어; 韓國語) or Gugeo (국어; 國語; literally "national language"). It is sometimes colloquially called urimal ("our language"; 우리말 in one word in South Korea, 우리 말 with a space in North Korea). On the other hand, Korean people in the former USSR, who refer to themselves as Koryo-saram (also Goryeoin [고려인; 高麗人; literally, "Goryeo person(s)"]) call the language Goryeomal (고려말; 高麗말). In mainland China, following the establishment of diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1992, the term Cháoxiǎnyǔ (朝鲜语 or short form: Cháoyǔ (朝语)) has normally been used to refer to the language spoken in North Korea and Yanbian, while Hánguóyǔ (韩国语 or short form: Hányǔ (韩语)) is used to refer to the language spoken in South Korea. Some older English sources also used the name "Corean" to refer to the language, country, and people. Korean is regarded in the West as a difficult language to learn, an opinion that was expressed as early as 1880 by German businessman Ernst Oppert, who wrote: "The difficulties in acquiring and properly speaking the Corean language are by no means inferior to those which beset the study of the Chinese; they are even considered by many to be infinitely greater, and they cannot be likened to the comparatively easy manner with which even foreigners are able to acquire a knowledge of Japanese in a proportionately short time. The United States' Defense Language Institute classifies Korean alongside Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese as a Category IV language, meaning that 63 weeks of instruction (as compared to just 25 weeks for French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian) are required to bring an English-speaking student to a limited working level of profiency in which he or she has "sufficient capability to meet routine social demands and limited job requirements" and "can deal with concrete topics in past, present, and future tense." As a result, the study of Korean language in the United States is dominated by Korean American heritage language students; they are estimated to form over 80% of all students of the language at non-military universities. However, Korean is considerably easier for speakers of certain other languages, such as Japanese; in Japan, it is more widely studied by non-heritage learners. The Korean Language Proficiency Test, an examination aimed at assessing non-native speakers' competence in Korean, was instituted in 1997; 17,000 people applied for the 2005 sitting of the examination. This was taken from wikipedia
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